DESCRIPTION: The long-term objective of the proposed research is to understand the role of personality and the behavioral risk and protective factors and their contribution to health and disease at mid- life. There are two specific aims. The first aim deals with understanding personality-disease associations by focusing on the role of risk factors that may be motivated by personality characteristics. The second aim deals with an understanding of the sources of stability and change in adult personality during the crucial decade of the 40's, and is designed to look at intervening health events compared to other "events" requiring adjustment as stimuli for personality change. The proposed research builds on two ongoing studies of biobehavioral studies in cardiovascular disease, the University of North Carolina Alumni Heart Study (UNCAHS) and the Mediators of Social Support (MOSS). The UNCAHS cohort was assembled from persons with personality data measured at college entrance in 1964-66 who were invited to join a new prospective study of personality and social factors in coronary heart disease (CHD) and CHD risk in 1986. The UNCAHS is in its eighth year of funding and has adult data on approximately 4,100 men and 900 women and 1,100 of their spouses (900 women and 200 men). This study has collected information on personality and risk behaviors from the age of 19 to 47. The proposed study will accomplish its aims by adding a second adult measure of personality functioning for ongoing study respondents and their spouses approximately 6 years after the first adult measurement and verify reported non-coronary diseases occurring in the cohort before the age of 50 (coronary disease is already verified for this cohort). The MOSS Study, currently in its 2nd year, is enrolling a consecutive cohort of persons evaluated for coronary artery disease in the Duke Cardiac Catherization laboratory who will be followed for three years to test hypotheses about the role of social support and mortality in heart disease. This cohort includes approximately 500 middle aged men and women with and without documented CAD who have baseline risk factor and social support data as part of the MOSS protocol.